


The Body, the Breath

by skyshores



Category: Mononoke-hime | Princess Mononoke
Genre: Amorous Sports, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 17:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyshores/pseuds/skyshores
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's good to be alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. After the Flesh

Effortless it was, at the beginning, for San to look at Ashitaka and regard only the onset of rot that would soon change him into a nest of blanched bones and mossy wake. But the blackened skin was still firm, she realised, like the bark of a smoothish birch bole, when she coasted her paws about the passage of the decay. Even so, San could almost hear the death ricocheting beneath his shoulders hollowing him out one underskin tunnel at a time.

Growing up amidst the beauty of pure, voluminous furs and tall, green trees had San turning from and, in time, eclipsing her recognition of her hairless, clawless, rootless smallness. She was a true heir to the gods, the forest’s daughter, a wolf. Not human, no. Her touch would not rot the earth beneath her.

Yet, as Shishigami-sama’s glittering light engulfed San and the curse passed through her, her abjuration of her five-fingered heritage struck its end. Fear ceased. Hatred abraded. A wound was closing in the rift opening. The human hands that held her were the same as the human hands that lifted Shishigami-sama’s head; no corporeal wolf could do what she did. After that day San held her constitution as high as she held the body of the dead god. Before she had only loved it for what it could do, which was a love only a half of a whole.

Arduous it was, now, for San to look at Ashitaka and count the things she did see.

Early in her infancy San had with her mother and her brothers stumbled upon a derelict tree that had yielded persimmons in winter. San had leapt for the black skinny branches only to fall upon her rump, slashing her knee open, bleeding rivers into the snow. Even now she could not forget her first sighting of the gleaming crystal hoar dusted over the fruit. She remembered her first bite much better than the pain. The comfort of her mother’s words, long since lost now, paired with the supplest, most wonderful sweetness of the persimmon’s bright layered ripened flesh had exiled all thoughts of the wound.

Then her teeth had grazed the hard, dark seed. At the time San had not known what seeds were, nor for what they were meant. Her mother had explained they were beginnings from which all verdure sprouted. When a pup she had often wondered if an entire forest would grow in her belly if she swallowed one. The memory of the idea remained after the wood went, though San had long since realised the folly of her fancy.

Now and then, when San looked at Ashitaka, she would think of the persimmons and the dingles in her belly, and would regard him as she regarded all earth, grass, seeds, blooms, and rain. San learned to do this in the green and golden midsummer, amidst soft swaying grasses taller than men and thicker than seas.

Ashitaka was tracing the periphery of her sweat-swathed navel, looking at her as if she were a forest much greater than both she and he were in the flesh.

And then, when she kissed him, she pushed her warm living hips forward, and welcomed the firm unforeseen root of his eager vitality.


	2. Before the Breath

Sometimes in their closeness in coupling, Ashitaka would feel so tender towards San his body would stammer and crow with the ache. It was not the supposed frailty of her of which he became mindful (for wolves were hardy creatures, and she was the best of any of them), but the largeness, the loudness of the heart he feared her frame could not contain.

Each breath her blushing beating body housed sent him a rush of something between ecstasy and terror. He was afraid of the great howling thing he might cause to crack if he held her too hard. But she wanted him to hold her hard with his teeth and his nails. And she held him the way she wanted to be held and left on him imprints of thumbs and tongues in a blue-black script he could never understand.

During the days away from all the licking and biting and holding San was calmer. Ashitaka had seen her, at many dawns and dusks, facing nothing he could see, rue pouring into her black eyes as does rain into a wellspring drained. Intermittently he had heard her speak the speech of sparrows. Often she would mumble, like one lost, into the ruffs of her brothers. They were not the last times she would reveal herself to him, he knew.

Strangely, San blinked far less than any girl Ashitaka had met; her eyelashes batted as slowly as those of the village pups. He learned this because, before they would fall asleep in each other’s company, they would wordlessly compete to see who could hold their gaze the longest. With great relish Ashitaka would admire San’s yawns and breaths and indomitable black eyes. He loved her expressions of surprise and pleasure and sleepiness best for their childlike sincerity. A familiar tenderness would always rise in Ashitaka when San would study him, with all the diligence of a star-reader, padded by a softness that belied her grip. But she always won. Ashitaka would be too sleepy to bask long in the feeling, and would close his eyes and submit to slumber as San breathed life into his stammering, crowing dreams.


	3. Life Ashimmer

San dreamt her heart’s roots had caught fire. Ashitaka was encircling the hard black burning gnarls inside her body. He stroked her breasts and eased the jagged flames within. As the fire perished his fingertips broomed great ash mounds away from her lungs. His kisses swallowed her incendiaries, hushing her, extracting from her nostrils the smoke, the iron, the stink. She held him close and hard to her after he did this, and heard his ribs crack under the crush of her pale arms. What a strange pair we've become, she thought, and what foreign things our limbs do to one another. Unstifled by disaster, the greenery in San thrived again; tempered by tenderness, Ashitaka's bones mended thrice as firm. She would like her blooms and lichen and moss and vines to be tangled in his trellis of a skeleton. Looking into him through a mirrored skin, she saw such a fancy had already begun.

When she woke it was not yet dawn. His moon-glazed eyes were directed at her, scurrying in their sockets. It had been two days since the clash with the rounin upriver. Ashitaka's wounds were still healing so San had to be very gentle about him.

"What are you looking for?" she asked, and touched his cheek to try and quell his frantic look.

"Quietness," he said, without guise or pause. And then he at last closed his eyes.

Later, she said, “If I find the brutes, I’ll pulverise them. Then I’ll chew them up.”

Ashitaka sluggishly opened one sleek dark eye. “I’ll chew _you_ up,” he laughed, leaning in. He curled his mouth about her wrist, his nipping melting into gentle kissing just hard enough to leave small imprints of teeth. “You taste very good.”

“Whu— _listen_.”

Ashitaka breathed into her neck, “Mmmmm. Delicious.”

“Ashi—ah—ahahahaha—!”

After he stopped monopolising San’s wits through his use of the incredible sensitivity of her upper abdomen she grabbed him by the shoulders and bit his neck to bleeding.

“Ow…”

“Live!”

“Live?”

“Yes! How wasteful it would be for you to die, after everything. I hate waste!” San growled, as Ashitaka quietened. “Give me thirty, forty, fifty of your springs. In return I’ll give you as many of my winters.”

“San—”

“You _must_ live. It’s important! More important than anything else I’d ask of you—more important than—than—”

Ashitaka crawled close to her and eased her into a slow and warm and all-encompassing embrace, like the one in the dream. He flinched a little because the gashes in his sides had not wholly closed when he pressed them to her. Then he touched her hair, scraped the soot and sorrow from her scalp, and said, “There, there. I’m never going anywhere you don’t want me to. I promise, I promise.”

She hid her face in the bend where his neck ended and shoulder began, which was one of her favourite places to be, and dropped her tears there.

“Ashitaka,” she said into his robes, “we’re going to live a long, long time. Long enough to make up for my mother and Shishigami-sama.”

“Of course,” he said, and his hands slid down to her fingers, “and in that time we’ll do all sorts of nice things together. Come, the sun’s almost up. Shall we go and watch it rise?”

**Author's Note:**

> Writing Mononoke Hime fic is basically occasional typing sandwiched between a lot of time spent shoving my face into my hands. These used to be three separate oneshots, which each took more than three months to poop out!


End file.
